Anwar al-Awlaki speaks in a video message posted on radical websites in 2010. In April, U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer dismissed a lawsuit against Obama administration officials for the 2011 drone-strike killings of three U.S. citizens in Yemen, including U.S.-born al-Qaida leader al-Awlaki. Collyer said the case raises serious constitutional issues and is not easy to answer, but that “on these facts and under this circuit’s precedent,” the court will grant the Obama administration’s request. (AP Photo/SITE Intelligence Group, File)

The threats are diffuse. The enemy has no single flag. The battlefields are scattered.

It is in this context that President Obama claims war-making authority to use unmanned drones to find and kill enemies abroad — even American citizens.

We’re glad to see the administration has signaled it is finally abandoning efforts to keep secret its legal rationale for having taken the lives of U.S. citizens overseas who were deemed threats to this nation. It’s unfortunate this debate had to drag on for several years before the administration was sufficiently pressured to take this step.

The coercion came in the form of a federal appeals court ruling in April saying the government must release its legal reasoning. Administration officials last week finally said they will not appeal.

The administration also got heat from a group of U.S. senators, including Mark Udall, D-Colo., who had pledged to block an appeals court nominee unless the administration made the memo public.

“This is a welcome development for government transparency and affirms that although the government does have the right to keep national security secrets, it does not get to have secret laws,” Udall said.

Udall said with the promise of disclosure, he was ready to support the judicial nomination of David Barron, a Harvard law professor and former Justice Department official who wrote the memo at issue.

On Thursday, the Senate confirmed Barron’s nomination for a seat on the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Boston.

What remains is for the release of the memo — and without so much redaction that it’s impossible to make sense of it.

Given the Bill of Rights and federal law, it is difficult to see how the government could justify the killing of a citizen without judicial due process. But let us at least see the full reasoning.

Thus far, U.S. officials have acknowledged killing four U.S. citizens overseas, but contend that only one was explicitly targeted. Americans deserve to know when their government believes it can take citizens’ lives, and they have the right to challenge such a breathtaking assertion of power.